Methods for evaluating gene expression from Affymetrix microarray datasets

Ning Jiang, Lindsey J Leach, Xiaohua Hu, Elena Potokina, Tianye Jia, Arnis Druka, Robbie Waugh, Michael J Kearsey, Zewei W Luo

Affymetrix high density oligonucleotide expression arrays are widely used across all fields of biological research for measuring genome-wide gene expression. An important step in processing oligonucleotide microarray data is to produce a single value for the gene expression level of an RNA transcript using one of a growing number of statistical methods. The challenge for the researcher is to decide on the most appropriate method to use to address a specific biological question with a given dataset. Although several research efforts have focused on assessing performance of a few methods in evaluating gene expression from RNA hybridization experiments with different datasets, the relative merits of the methods currently available in the literature for evaluating genome-wide gene expression from Affymetrix microarray data collected from real biological experiments remain actively debated.